Yesterday there was a shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon. Five people died. Three students, a teacher, and the 16 year old assailant.
Super tragic. Never should have happened.
What frustrates me after every school shooting in our country is how many people start talking about better mental health care, hardening school buildings, having armed guards in schools, making parents liable for gun deaths caused by their children, and such.
This ignores the real cause of both school shootings and other gun-related deaths (murders, suicides, accidents) in the United States: too damn many guns in our country!
Here’s some facts, courtesy of Claude AI. (I’ll share Claude’s complete response to the questions I asked it at the end of this post.)
- The population of England & Wales is about 62 million. The US population is about 342 million. So the US has about 5.5 times as many people as England & Wales.
- In the past 10 years, 2016-2025 the US had 272 school shooting deaths. England & Wales had zero. In fact, England & Wales has had only one school shooting incident ever, in 1996, thirty years ago. The Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 then banned handguns.
- England & Wales has many mentally disturbed people. It also has many violent people. What it doesn’t have is nearly as many guns as the US.
- The US has about 120 civilian firearms per 100 people. England & Wales has about 3.2 civilian firearms per 100 people. So the US has about 38 times more firearms per 100 people than England & Wales.
- In 2024 the US had about 12.8 firearm deaths per 100,000 people. England & Wales had about 0.25 firearm deaths per 100,000 people. So the US firearm death rate per 100,000 population is about 51 times the England & Wales rate.
Here’s a chart that shows how US gun deaths per 100,000 population compare to other countries. Note that the figures for our country and England & Wales are close to what Claude AI came up with. The conclusion is clear: more guns means more gun deaths. The US has very lax gun laws; the UK and Japan have very strict gun laws. We’re at the top; the UK and Japan are at the bottom.
If you want a cinematic proof, watch The Gold on PBS. I just finished Season 1 of this Masterpiece Theatre production. The Gold is about a 1983 gold heist in England that involved a ton and a half of gold bars stolen from Brinks.
It’s solid entertainment, and also an interesting reflection of how different the gun culture, or rather lack thereof, is in England compared to the United States. In the six episodes I watched, the British police never, not once, brandished a gun. Neither did the thieves. The only killing was with a knife.
Watching The Gold, this came to seem perfectly natural to me. There were many threats against the detectives investigating the gold theft. Yet again, no one, not the police nor the thieves, ever pulled out a gun. In American shows of this sort, a shoot-out would have happened repeatedly.
Few guns. Less gun violence. That’s the lesson of England & Wales. Until the United States learns that lesson, we’ll continue to have hugely more firearm deaths than other high income countries.
Here’s my questions to Claude AI and Claude’s responses:
ME:I want to compare gun violence in the United States and Great Britain. Can you tell me: (1) How many guns per 100,000 population were there in each country in 1983 and the most recent year for which this data is available, such as 2025 or 2024. (2) How many gun deaths per 100,000 population were there in each country in 1983 and the most recent year for which this data is available, such as 2025 or 2024. (3) How many deaths from school shootings there were in each country for the past ten years for which data is available.
CLAUDE: I’ve gathered the best figures available. Two caveats up front: British gun data is mostly for England & Wales (not all of Great Britain), and the 1983 gun-count figures for both countries are estimates, because neither country counted guns that year. I’ve noted where I did the arithmetic myself.
(1) Guns per 100,000 people
| ~1983 | Most recent | |
|---|---|---|
| United States | ~65,000–80,000 (my estimate) | ~120,500 (2017) |
| England & Wales (legally held only) | ~3,900 (my estimate) | ~3,200 (March 2025) |
US now: The Small Arms Survey 2017 estimated 120.5 civilian firearms per 100 US residents, about 393 million guns. That is still the most widely cited figure. A newer study estimated the US stock at 378 million firearms in 2022. Wikipediaajou
US 1983: There is no direct count for 1983, so I interpolated from the nearest data points:
- Per capita, the civilian gun stock roughly doubled from 1968 to 2009, going from one gun for every two people to one gun per person. gunpolicy
- A 1994 national survey found 44 million Americans owning 192 million firearms. ojp
England & Wales now: As of 31 March 2025, there were 626,276 firearms covered by firearm certificates and 1,332,209 shotguns covered by shotgun certificates. That totals about 1.96 million guns, roughly 3.2 per 100 people. These are legal guns only. No official estimate of illegally held firearms in England and Wales exists. wwwwww
England & Wales 1983: Only licence counts exist for that year: 159,800 firearm certificates and 783,400 shotgun certificates. I estimated the number of guns using the guns-per-certificate ratios from the mid-1990s. gunpolicygunpolicy
(2) Gun deaths per 100,000 people (homicide, suicide, accidents combined)
| 1983 | Most recent | |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 13.3 | 12.8 (2024) |
| England & Wales / UK | ~0.5 (my estimate) | ~0.2–0.3 |
US 1983: CDC data give a firearm death rate of 13.3 per 100,000 for 1983. cdc
US 2024: The rate was 12.8 per 100,000, with 44,447 people killed by guns. Gun suicides were 7.6 per 100,000 and gun homicides 4.7. pewresearchpewresearch
Britain now: The total is built from its parts:
- In 2024/25, firearms were used in 32 homicides in England and Wales. statista
- Gunshot suicides make up about 2.5% of suicides in England and Wales, more than 100 deaths per year. springer
Taken together, that is about a fiftieth of the US rate.
Britain 1983: I derived this estimate from a study reporting that, around 1983, England and Wales had a crude suicide rate of 8.6 per 100,000, with 4.4% of suicides by firearm. That works out to roughly 0.4 per 100,000 for gun suicides, plus a small number of gun homicides. aphapublications
The two countries’ trends point in different directions. The US rate is essentially unchanged since 1983. Britain’s was already very low and has roughly halved.
(3) School shooting deaths, last ten years (2016–2025)
| Year | US deaths | UK deaths |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 10 | 0 |
| 2017 | 19 | 0 |
| 2018 | 43 | 0 |
| 2019 | 20 | 0 |
| 2020 | 10 | 0 |
| 2021 | 18 | 0 |
| 2022 | 49 | 0 |
| 2023 | 39 | 0 |
| 2024 | 28 | 0 |
| 2025 | 36 | 0 |
| Total | 272 | 0 |
The US figures come from Wikipedia’s compiled list, which covers K–12 schools, colleges and universities, and school buses, and counts shooters among the dead. It is a conservative count, because it excludes murder-suicides by estranged partners, single-person suicides, and police actions. Other databases with broader definitions report higher numbers. WikipediaWikipedia
For Britain, the 1996 Dunblane shooting, which killed 16 children, was the deadliest school shooting in British history and also the only one. The Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 then banned handguns. ksatsnopes
One caution if you write this up: the gun-count comparison is the weakest part. The US numbers are estimates without a registry, and the British numbers cover legal guns only. The death-rate comparison rests on solid official mortality data.
Sources:
- Estimated number of civilian guns per capita by country (Wikipedia / Small Arms Survey)
- JAMA Network Open – US firearm stock forecast
- GunPolicy.org – CRS “How Many Guns”
- Cook & Ludwig, Guns in America (NIJ)
- Home Office – Firearm and shotgun certificates, April 2024 to March 2025
- Home Office user guide to certificate statistics
- GunPolicy.org – E&W firearm certificates 1983–2020
- GunPolicy.org – E&W shotgun certificates 1979–2009
- CDC – Firearm-related death rates, 1980–96
- Pew Research – What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.
- Statista – E&W firearm homicides
- Sutton et al., Gunshot suicides in England
- AJPH – International firearm suicide data
- Wikipedia – List of school shootings in the US (2000–present)
- AP – Dunblane grieves for Uvalde
- Snopes – Dunblane and the handgun ban
England and Wales: about 62 million. The Office for National Statistics estimates 62.0 million for mid-2025: 58,834,800 in England and 3,175,200 in Wales. Mid-2025 is the most recent official figure.
The US therefore has about 5.5 times as many people as England and Wales. That is why the per-100,000 rates matter more than raw totals when comparing the two. These population figures don’t change the per-capita numbers I gave you earlier in any meaningful way.
Sources:
| Deaths, 2016–2025 | Per 10 million people, over the decade | Per 10 million people, per year | |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 272 | ~8 | ~0.8 |
| England & Wales | 0 | 0 | 0 |
A more concrete way to put it: if England and Wales, with 62 million people, had the US rate, they would have seen about 49 school shooting deaths over those ten years, or roughly 5 a year. They had none.
When you use these numbers, keep in mind how the US figure was counted:
- It includes colleges and universities, not just K–12 schools.
- It counts shooters among the dead.
- It excludes some categories, such as suicides and domestic murder-suicides on school grounds, so other databases report higher totals.
Even so, the per-capita framing shows that the difference isn’t a matter of population size. It’s zero against a steady annual toll.
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